alflatters.co.uk

So on Friday we took it upon ourselves with permission obviously to rackmount one of the new virtual machines base computer into a rackmountable case. As currently they are normal desktops from the lab rooms which are across the desks which doesn’t look very professional also kinda bad if they get unplugged and vms go down! The case we got for this job was the departments old game server, this had packed up with one core not working and since was xeons we couldn’t afford to replace this so upgrading a server case from a full size server motherboard with old harddrive connections with only molex power to a new quad core AMD machine with sata was a challenge. Getting it out was the first challenge with no decent screwdriver (till we aquired one from Adam (thanks)). There was so many screws holding the thing down but we striped it right back to bare metal eventually allowing the motherboard mounts to move to more suited locations. With no back plate for the harddrives we had to wire them in manually in the hot swap bays as a new back plate would cost about £60 which we couldn’t justify with still wanting a 24 port gigabyte switch (managed if possible) anyone got one send it my way! But anyhow most things went without a hitch still got more fans to wire since out of the 7 case fans only one works from lack of fan ports on the motherboard but hopefully a molex adapter will sort this as we had to do with the sata power also. We had some rewiring to do also as the old board was 2 physical cpus so had a 8 pin power to the CPU so we hacked one off another CPU and joined a nice 4 pin onto it, rather a good job but Ash said he will solider it just to make sure on Monday. So that’s another server nearly done. Now just need another 3/4 cases to do the rest!